Half Light
by Sword Pen
Summary: Two people who haven't been kissed in five years, who haven't been touched except to be hurt. Dustfinger and Resa. This is their story. Rated for strong violence and content in later chapters. First serious full length! R & R!


**Disclaimer**: Don't own Resa, don't own Capricorn, don't own the unnamed person at the end of the chapter.

**A/N: **Wow... this has been bouncing around in my head for a looong time. I came on fanfic to publish this story, and what happened? I published 14 others and this sat on my word processor gathering dust. So R & R, I won't update without a decent ammount of reviews, please don't flame, etc.

So, without further ado:

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**Half-Light: A Twist of Fate**

Home.

For Resa Folchart, the word meant so much.

She wanted to see her husband, again… he surely would've remarried by now, and her daughter, who had spent more than half her life without a mother.

Five years.

Five years wishing for what she couldn't have.

Five years not getting any closer.

She was back in her own world now… surely that was a start… even without her voice…

If only she could believe it.

The painful reality was that she might as well have stayed in Capricorn's damn village. Nothing but wild country for miles, and all she had was the dress on her back and the miniscule amount of food she had managed to steal.

But she couldn't really have stayed there, could she? Of course not. It was either run away, or go completely mad.

One more day scrubbing on her hands and knees, one more day being locked up in the dark for something she hadn't done, one more day of Capricorn's cold, expressionless eye looking at her as if he owned her…

Well he damn well did, didn't he? Capricorn owned everything around him, even his men, who were too stupid to notice.

Yes, Resa Folchart had been a prisoner too long.

And yes, it was better to starve out here than to suffocate slowly, to die a little more every day, in there.

At least she would die free.

Free. The word had a sort of peculiarity to it, like a half-remembered dream. It seemed utterly strange to her, after three years, but it was somewhere inside of her, just the same. As if she was seeing it in a shadow, in half-light.

Of course, she had run before, when Darius had first brought her out of the book. She had thought that she would have an advantage in her own story.

She was wrong, of course, she had been wrong so many times in the past five years when the world had turned on its head and refused to right itself again.

She still remembered… _No! That's enough!_ She refused to let herself think, just drove herself to keep moving, keep pressing forward… which was difficult as she wasn't entirely sure which way was up…

She was wiser this time. She went in the opposite direction of the main road, choosing, instead to plunge directly into the remote landscape surrounding the village.

She'd eluded capture for almost a week this time, but was she really making more progress than she had a year ago?

Just now, it didn't seem like it.

OooOOoOoO

The midday sun beat down on her almost as hard as Mortola used to beat her, and sweat ran down her back like blood drawn by the rod.

Resa was starving, parched, and exhausted, but she desperately needed somewhere to hide, something that the wide plain clearly lacked.

Not that the going was easy. She waded through brush as she might have waded through a sea… a brown, dead sea.

_Keep your eyes open… Tread carefully… _How many times had she told herself that?

How many times…

She never saw the snake, just felt the piercing, burning sensation in her lower leg. She glanced down and swore mentally.

She must have disturbed it while jumping back to avoid a small animal shooting out of the brush.

Well, that didn't matter now. The wound was large. She cleaned away some of the blood with her skirt. New blood replaced it rapidly.

_Damn._ Resa thought. What had bitten her? With her luck it was one of the small black snakes, powerful bites and deadly venom.

She needed a doctor, that much was true, but the only people who would be traveling out here were Basta and the rest of the Black Jackets.

No point in staying where she was. Wrapping a cloth tightly around her leg, Resa stood and limped onward.

If she had thought the going was hard before, she should have thought about making the trek with one of her legs nearly useless.

Night was falling as she collapsed. Normally, she would have kept on; she still hadn't reached a reasonable shelter.

But tonight, she couldn't walk anymore. She was so very dizzy… perhaps she'd just rest for a moment…

Perhaps…

And everything went black.

When Resa regained consciousness, she knew she wasn't going anywhere. She could barely open her eyes, and she couldn't sit up at all.

For the next day, she drifted in and out of awareness, staying awake just long enough to decide that thirst would take her first.

Perhaps it was night again by the time she heard another human voice… somehow, it seemed more real than the others she had heard today…

And felt human hands feeling her forehead, her pulse, lifting her up.

_No_, she thought feebly. _No…_

Someone was holding her, speaking softly… perhaps they weren't taking her back to Capricorn, after all, perhaps she really was dying.

Perhaps…

She thought no more.

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**A/N: **Guess who? 


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